The Key To Oprah Winfrey's Success: Radical Focus

After revamping her once-struggling TV channel, Oprah Winfrey has figured out how to make time for the projects she cares about most.

- J.jJ. McCorvey

I’ve come to interview the world’s most famous interviewer, and she has already caught me off guard. “So, what’s your intention here with me?” Oprah Winfrey asks, her legs crossed, a serious look on her face. We’re talking in Winfrey’s office at the Los Angeles headquarters of her television channel, the Oprah Winfrey Network (aka OWN), and the flowing white drapes, gilded light fixtures, and flocculent, cloudlike sofa make the room feel more like heaven than Hollywood. A floor-to-ceiling oak bookshelf behind her immaculately tidy desk is full of intimidating mementos, including one of her 18 Emmy awards and a photograph of her with Nelson Mandela.

Winfrey has invited me to spend some time watching her run her media empire, and so far, my visit has been going well. Despite her massive celebrity (and the fact that she met me just an hour ago), she is warm, huggy, and— true to her spiritual-guru persona—immediately invested in teaching me something I can use to improve my life. We have already bonded over Mississippi, where we were both born (“What a wowzer that is for me!” she says). But then she drops this oddly blunt question about my intent, and I’m unexpectedly stumped. Finally, after a bit of rambling, I come up with an answer. “I’m here,” I tell her, “to learn how Oprah gets stuff done.”